Since I joined Siteworx back in ’07 I’ve invested a great deal of effort in driving our messaging to the heart of the unique problems we help clients solve. Last year was pivotal. Not only was it a strong year for our business, in spite of the tough economy, but it was  also the year we were able to really focus our marketing efforts around designing user-centric web experiences utilizing core technologies such as Web content management (WCM), enterprise search and Web analytics. If you’ve followed Siteworx for any amount of time, you’ve hopefully picked up on these areas of emphasis in our marketing efforts. You’ll see a lot more of it in our new website which is due to launch in the coming weeks … more on that to come.

Yesterday, I decided to drop in at the
Microsoft Fast Forward Summit
to get an up close and personal view on the enterprise search world. As a marketer, I’m always looking to get close to actual practitioners to hear their pain points first hand. While we have our own search geeks at Siteworx—I use the term with the utmost respect—it’s nice to get new perspectives. I’ll admit that as someone who doesn’t live enterprise search on a daily basis, it was a bit like drinking from a fire hose.

For the folks I met at Fast Forward, search isn’t just part of a well-designed, functional website. Search IS the website. If you think about it from their perspective, search drives just about every interaction that matters on a customer-facing website or portal/Intranet. From the aggregation of user comments, ratings and reviews, to the connections people make based on common areas of interest, it’s all powered by search. And Microsoft has a pretty strong story to tell, now that they’re a few years into their acquisition of Fast ESP. I was frankly surprised to hear some of the most compelling case examples in the Government Track. The FBI’s Chief Knowledge Officer, G. Clayton Grigg walked through the full lifecycle of how data is ingested, shared and protected. He’s a great storyteller by the way.
Walton N. Smith, III
talked about how Booz Allen Hamilton is leveraging search in its drive to match the right people with the right information across the organization.

Microsoft is also trying to rationalize the product roadmap for Sharepoint and Fast, which is not an easy task in any acquisition, but seems exceedingly difficult for them to explain, even for the search geeks in the audience. My take on it, and I may have missed something so feel free to tell me I’m wrong, is that they’ll have three tiers within the product for 2010:

* Search Server Express (the budget-friendly “free” version)


* Standalone Fast


* Sharepoint Integrated

Over time, they’ll move to unify the code base which will result in moving to a single platform support (Windows-only) and will no longer support Unix and Linux.

The over-arching theme struck throughout the summit is the importance of building user-centric search interfaces, which is definitely in line with our positioning at Siteworx. Below you’ll find an example of a search interface we developed for US News Ventures. This UI incorporates advertising and delivers major product comparison data such as price, MPG, rankings, in one view. This is just one example, but it’s a good one because of all that the UI had to accomplish.

If you’re a search geek, feel free to chime in with your point of view on the UIs we’re showing here and Microsoft’s roadmap for Fast and Sharepoint. Several of their roadmap announcements sound pretty significant if you’re a current Sharepoint or Fast customer. How are the changes they announced affecting your plans?